Because no good deed goes unpunished, I won tickets to a varsity hockey game last Friday night. I took Rowan with me, and you can read about how it all went down at my post this week on Today's Parent.

“Will you even know what you’re watching?” Rachel asked me, in what I thought was an unnecessary show of nonconfidence.

I rolled my eyes. “A bunch of guys with sticks want to get the puck into the other guys’ net. And vice versa. What else is there to know?”

She just sighed. ...

I will give varsity hockey this much: those guys can skate. Like, really skate. What I admittedly didn’t understand about the game (“Um, how many periods in a hockey game? Asking for a friend,” I telegraphed out onto Facebook) was eclipsed by the beauty of watching so many bodies move so effortlessly across the ice, weaving through each other, backwards and forwards, and only occasionally colliding. Whereupon, of course, they punched each other, kind of like my own children do. Guys, I wanted to tell them, it’s only a game.